education-blogs

Carnival of Education #159: Briefing the Next US President on 35 Issues

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Dear Mr or Mrs Next US President,

Thank you for stop­ping dur­ing recess for a quick study ses­siMeditation School Studentson. 35 edu­ca­tors have col­lab­o­rat­ed to present this Car­ni­val of Edu­ca­tion as a use­ful les­son plan for you and your edu­ca­tion pol­i­cy team on what our real con­cerns and sug­ges­tions are.

In case this is your first vis­it to our Sharp­Brains blog, let me first of all point out some use­ful resources to stay sane dur­ing the rest of the cam­paign: select­ed Brain Teasers, a list of 21 great Brain Books, over a dozen inter­views with lead­ing sci­en­tists on learn­ing and brain-based top­ics, and more.

With­out fur­ther ado, let’s pro­ceed to the issues raised. We hope they pro­vide, at the very least, good men­tal stim­u­la­tion for you and your advisors.

Edu­ca­tion as a System 

What do Medicine, HR, Green living, Videogames, and Genes have in common…

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…that understanding how our brains and minds work may con­tribute to all of them.

Here you have some of the best blog car­ni­vals (col­lec­tions of blog posts on spe­cif­ic top­ics) we have con­tributed to this week:

  • Grand Rounds: “brain exer­cise” is as impor­tant as nutri­tion, phys­i­cal exer­cise and stress management.
  • Green Liv­ing: let’s start the con­ver­sa­tion about “sus­tain­able brains”.
  • Human Resources: isn’t it obvi­ous, yet often neglected, that “human cap­i­tal” rests on brain devel­op­ment and learn­ing how to learn?.
  • Brain Fit­ness Car­ni­val: ful­ly devot­ed to our topic.
  • Video Game Blog­gers: “games” can be good vehi­cles for cog­ni­tive and emo­tion­al train­ing, if prop­er­ly devel­oped and used.
  • Gene Genie: our genes are not destiny.

You can also check the Med­i­cine 2.0 car­ni­val that we hosted.

Brain Health through Serious Games and Brain Exercise

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Eliane writes a great post esti­mat­ing the size of the Seri­ous Games Mar­ket, build­ing on the over­all Price­Wa­ter­house­C­oop­ers report that seemed to indi­cate that the Glob­al Video Game Mar­ket is Set to Explode.

Some quotes

  • “The over­all gam­ing audi­ence con­tin­ues to expand and become some­what more female and old­er than in the past thanks to casu­al games and games becom­ing an “impor­tant part of cul­ture” — which in my view would embed the Seri­ous Games segment.”
  • “Where­as the mil­i­tary was one of the first cus­tomers of Seri­ous Games, it has been joined by a long line of users, includ­ing oth­er gov­ern­ment agen­cies, health­care providers, schools (both K‑12 and uni­ver­si­ties) and For­tune 500 com­pa­nies (for team build­ing, lead­er­ship train­ing, sales train­ing and prod­uct edu­ca­tion, among others).”
  • “This is my con­ser­v­a­tive esti­mate: the Seri­ous Games mar­ket would be rang­ing between $200 — 400 mil­lion per year only in US, in 2007. ”
  • “There is now an emer­gent sup­ply chain for Cor­po­rate Seri­ous Games, with a num­ber of cor­po­ra­tions tak­ing [Read more…] about Brain Health through Seri­ous Games and Brain Exercise

Discover the Brain

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Hot off the press!

We just found on the new­stand an amaz­ing spe­cial issue of Dis­cov­er mag­a­zine on The Brain-An Own­er’s Man­u­al (Spring 2007), with fas­ci­nat­ing arti­cles on how the mind changes from infan­cy to old age, female vs. male brains (yes, we men have brains too), videogames as brain train­ing (by Steven John­son), an arti­cle titled “24 hours in the life of the brain”, the “most mag­nif­i­cent neu­rons, and much much more.

A bit tech­ni­cal, but not too much for any­one who reads pop­u­lar sci­ence books. It will prob­a­bly become a clas­sic for brain afi­ciona­dos. We can not find any men­tion of it in www.discover.com, so we will keep our eyes open and link to the index and more info as soon as we find some­where to link to…ÂÂ